We want to provide announcements, events, leadership messages and resources that are relevant to you. Your selection is stored in a browser cookie which you can remove at any time using “Clear all personalization” below.
This past spring, Stanford University computer scientists unveiled their pandemic brainchild, Code In Place, a project where 1,000 volunteer teachers taught 10,000 students across the globe the content of an introductory Stanford computer science course.

Students in Code In Place evaluated the feedback they received using this carefully designed user interface. (Image credit: Code In Place 2021)
While the instructors could share their knowledge with hundreds, even thousands, of students at a time during lectures, when it came to homework, large-scale and high-quality feedback on student assignments seemed like an insurmountable task.
“It was a free class anyone in the world could take, and we got a whole bunch of humans to help us teach it,” said Chris Piech, assistant professor of computer science and co-creator of Code In Place. “But the one thing we couldn’t really do is scale the feedback. We can scale instruction. We can scale content. But we couldn’t really scale feedback.”
To solve this problem, Piech worked with Chelsea Finn, assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, and PhD students Mike Wu and Alan Cheng to develop and test a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence teaching tool capable of assisting educators in grading and providing meaningful, constructive feedback for a high volume of student assignments.
Their innovative tool, which is detailed in a Stanford AI Lab blogpost, exceeded their expectations.
In education, it can be difficult to get lots of data for a single problem, like hundreds of instructor comments on one homework question. Companies that market online coding courses are often similarly limited, and therefore rely on multiple-choice questions or generic error messages when reviewing students’ work.
“This task is really hard for machine learning because you don’t have a ton of data. Assignments are changing all the time, and they’re open-ended, so we can’t just apply standard machine learning techniques,” said Finn.
The answer to scaling up feedback was a unique method called meta-learning, by which a machine learning system can learn about many different problems with relatively small amounts of data.
“With a traditional machine learning tool for feedback, if an exam changed, you’d have to retrain it, but for meta-learning, the goal is to be able to do it for unseen problems, so you can generalize it to new exams and assignments as well,” said Wu, who has studied computer science education for over three years.
The group found it much easier to get a little bit of data, like 20 pieces of feedback, on a large variety of problems. Using data from previous iterations of Stanford computer science courses, they were able to achieve accuracy at or above human level on 15,000 student submissions; a task not possible just one year earlier, the researchers remarked.
The language used by the tool was very carefully crafted by the researchers. They wanted to focus on helping students grow, rather than just grading their work as right or wrong. The group credited “the human in the loop” and their focus on human involvement during development as essential to the positive reception to the AI tool.
Students in Code In Place were able to rate their satisfaction with the feedback they received, but without knowing whether the AI or their instructor had provided it. The AI tool learned from human feedback on just 10% of the total assignments and reviewed the remaining ones with 98% student satisfaction.
“The students rated the AI feedback a little bit more positively than human feedback, despite the fact that they’re both as constructive and that they’re both identifying the same number of errors. It’s just when the AI gave constructive feedback, it tended to be more accurate,” noted Piech.
Thinking of the future of online education and machine learning for education, the researchers are excited about the possibilities of their work.
“This is bigger than just this one online course and introductory computer science courses,” said Finn. “I think that the impact here lies substantially in making this sort of education more scalable and more accessible as a whole.”
Mike Wu is advised by Noah Goodman, associate professor of psychology and of computer science, who was also a member of this research team. Finn, Goodman and Piech are affiliates of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Goodman is also a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
This project was funded by the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Hoffman Yee Grant.
To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly Stanford Science Digest.

Taylor Kubota, Stanford News Service: (650) 724-7707; tkubota@stanford.edu
News, insights and events delivered to your inbox each weekday morning.
©CopyrightStanford University. Stanford, California 94305.

source

Teachers are facing blowback amid conflicts over using students’ preferred names and pronouns.
The latest case comes from Florida, where district officials declined to renew a Satellite Beach high school teacher’s contract after she called a student by their chosen name without parental permission. Officials say she violated a state law that bans the practice.
Florida is among several Republican-led states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Montana and North Dakota, that passed laws that either require parental permission for teachers to use a student’s preferred name or pronoun or make it permissible for teachers to ignore preferred names or pronouns regardless of whether parents consent. Indiana’s law requires schools to report when students request to use an alternate name or pronoun to parents.
It’s the first time a Florida teacher has lost a job since Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the legislation in 2023.
Elsewhere, school districts nationally have faced legal challenges after reprimanding teachers for refusing to use transgender or nonbinary students’ preferred names or pronouns.
A Virginia teacher who refused to use a student’s preferred pronouns was awarded $575,000 after filing a lawsuit against the school district he worked for more than five years ago, according to court filings and attorneys in the case. In March, a Wisconsin school district settled a lawsuit filed by one of its teachers who was fired after failing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronoun. A former teacher from the Oakland Unified School District sued the school district in December when she said she was fired after refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns.
The Brevard Public Schools’ decision to fire Satellite High School AP English teacher Melissa Calhoun began after an investigation determined she was calling a student by the student’s preferred name instead of the student’s legal name, said Janet Murnaghan, a spokesperson from the district. Calhoun has taught in the district for 12 years.
Murnaghan said Calhoun told the district she “knowingly did not comply with state statute.” FLORIDA TODAY, part of the USA TODAY Network, reached out to Calhoun but did not receive a response.
The teacher’s action violated the Florida Board of Education rule signed by DeSantis that says any student who wishes to go by an alternative name, whether a simple nickname or a name that correlates with a transgender identity, must have their parents sign a Parental Authorization for Deviation from Student’s Legal Name Form.
“BPS supports parents’ rights to be the primary decision-makers in their children’s lives, and Florida law affirms their right to be informed,” Murnaghan said.
Calhoun will finish her contract, which expires in May, Murnaghan said.
The school district’s decision also elicited support for Calhoun’s reinstatement from community members this week.
A group held hands in front of the school’s flagpole after dismissal April 10 and gathered in the parking lot with signs in support of Calhoun. Many others drove past, shouting Calhoun’s name and cheering from the windows of their cars.
An online petition to reinstate Calhoun reached more than 13,000 signatures by the evening.
Students circulated a petition at Satellite High School supporting Calhoun and garnered 284 signatures, said Ryan Matrigali, a junior at the school. Many of those signatures came with comments expressing disgust and dismay over the decision not to keep Calhoun.
A handful of community members, some with handmade signs, also showed up at a school board meeting April 8 to speak in support of Calhoun.
Kristine Staniec, a media specialist at Satellite High, said Calhoun’s violation of the law was done without “malicious intent.”
“My colleague and child’s teacher was let go after just two weeks of internal review,” Staniec said. “There was no harm, no threat to safety, no malicious intent, just a teacher trying to connect with a student, and for that, her contract was not renewed.”
Matrigali, the junior at Satellite High, said Calhoun is “beloved” at the school.
“Ms. Calhoun is a teacher loved by all of her students,” he said. “Her goal was to make everyone feel welcome … and to enhance their learning experience.”
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Florida chapter also is supporting Calhoun.
“Administrators should strive to retain great teachers, not toss them out merely for being respectful,” said Daniel Tilley, legal director of the ACLU of Florida, in a statement to FLORIDA TODAY. “Every student deserves a learning environment where they feel seen, safe, and supported.”
It’s unclear whether the Brevard Public Schools case will become a precedent for other teachers who don’t comply with Florida’s law. The rule doesn’t lay out what the consequences are for teachers and other staff members who don’t comply.
School districts have also come under fire after reprimanding teachers who refused to call students by their preferred names or pronouns. They’ve paid out thousands for those actions.
A Wisconsin school district paid $20,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by one of its teachers who was fired after failing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
Argyle High School teacher Jordan Cernek said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network, that the question came up at a school meeting about new Title IX criteria. Administrators told him there would be a new policy to make the district more inclusive of identities other than heterosexual males and females.
Cernek said he was uncomfortable complying with the changes.
“I know God our creator has created males and females, and there’s no changing of that reality, so I began to question some of those things that were being told to us,” Cernek said.
The district initially allowed Cernek to not use the student’s preferred pronouns on the grounds of religious objection, but two months later it changed its position, according to court records.
After praying and thinking it over, Cernek said, his mind couldn’t be changed. He said he did try addressing students through gestures rather than names and pronouns.
Eventually, he got a letter from the school telling him the accommodation was no longer working.
Six months after he received the letter, Cernek’s teaching contract was not renewed, according to a lawsuit he filed against the school district. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a Milwaukee-based law firm representing conservative interests, said terminating Cernek because of his beliefs was unconstitutional and violated the First Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Cernek said he was not seeking to return to his job but hoped the case would establish a principle that government institutions can’t force people to say things against their beliefs.
Similarly, a Virginia teacher who refused to use a student’s preferred pronouns was awarded $575,000 after suing his former school district, according to court filings and attorneys.
High school teacher Peter Vlaming avoided using he/him pronouns when referring to a transgender student, according to court records.
West Point Public Schools Superintendent Larry L. Frazier Jr. had told USA TODAY the school system was pleased to come to an agreement “that will not have a negative impact on the students, staff or school community of West Point.”
The school has since adopted policies issued by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin that say school staff “shall refer to each student using only the pronouns appropriate to the sex appearing in the student’s official record – that is, male pronouns for a student whose sex is male, and female pronouns for a student whose sex is female.”
Disputes over state laws that dictate how teachers address their transgender and nonbinary students have spurred student activism in Iowa, where a state bill proposed protecting teachers from punishment if they incorrectly used a student’s preferred pronouns or name. Advocates said the legislation was needed to create fewer “distractions” in the classroom and give teachers more freedom and protection.
Students spoke out against the bill during the legislative session, the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported.
JD Wilson, a 9-year-old student who uses they/them pronouns, said the legislation would harm transgender kids in Iowa’s K-12 schools.
“This bill allows kids to be bullied,” Wilson said.
Another Iowa student, 14-year-old Berry Stevens, who uses they/them pronouns, said the bill allowed adults and students in schools to go out of their way to dehumanize others.
“When I was in sixth grade, I decided to transition to different pronouns and a different name. Since then, I have had kids constantly use my own name as a weapon against me,” Stevens said. “You have no idea what it’s like to wake up each morning wondering if one of your peers is going to hurt you next just because you present yourself slightly differently.”
Melissa Peterson, a legislative and policy director with the Iowa State Education Association, called the bill a solution in search of a problem.
“This legislation is unnecessary,” Peterson said “I would also argue is a distraction for more important issues that are facing us in our public classrooms today.”
The measure failed to proceed in the Iowa state House.
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.

source